Stories about Game Development, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes and more

Big data reference architecture for an online multiplayer game on Azure

A customer I’ve been talking to recently asked me to work together to create a reference implementation (more like a proof of concept) for the next generation the backend for a game they currently have. In short, they needed a platform that would accommodate these needs and specifications:

accept incoming messages from game servers

incoming message rate would be a couple of hundred messages per minute

we need to store game session related events, so each piece of data is relevant to a specific game session that can run for minutes (20′-30′)

scalability and high availability (of course)

data is needed to be displayed in real-time (e.g. live leaderboards)

data is needed to be stored for later analysis (e.g. best players of the week)

This is a perfect example of a problem can be solved with a solution based on the lambda architecture pattern. After some research and some experimentation, we ended up using the following Azure services: